" . . . To reclaim some of what is being lost, I propose walking in the night.
This is not the chest-beating, public declaration of protest as commonly
understood, but a gently recalcitrant act against the confines of the
daily grind. To venture into the “thickness” of the night is to
experience, in a powerful and visceral way, a much broader world than
that which exists during the daytime."

" . . . The 'obscure space'
embedded in what the enlightenment identifies as 'man's nature' is both
exterior to him and indispensable to him . . . The obscure spaces of the
metropolitan city, which are at once alien to the bourgeois city's
self-image and essential to its project of self-aggrandisement, are also shadows and blind stains."(Matthew Beaumont, "Night Walking", 2015, pg 113-114)

I'm taking this as suggesting that the hidden alcoves, the shadow
filled alleys are unavoidable. They are the flip side of the pristine
modern city, but the pristine modern city does all it can to disavow
that these places and spaces are needed.

These spaces, I'm at
times exploring, are the spaces that those that help maintain the bright
sparkly clean future city walk through. I'm thinking of the cleaners,
the shop staff, the security staff, the waste disposal people, the
delivery people all of whom use the spaces that we tend to want to pass
by and ignore.

These half lit spaces are often seen as edgy and
dangerous but these are the spaces that the workers of the city use.
Those folk that are the backbone, who exist both in front of and behind
the scenes to keep the spectacle of the modern city running. These
spaces hold the side/back door entrances, trade entrances, delivery
bays, places that obscure the to-ings and fro-ings of those that
maintain the facade of the bright clean city. These spaces are needed
and unavoidably exist in opposition to the supposed 'perfection' that
they help support.

That's all...
*ponder ponder*

♦♦♦

Wednesday, 30 November 2016

Though obviously London centric the following videos presented by Alain De Botton are saliant views of city planning and some of the huge errors that have been incured in recent years and how to mititgate such errors.

Alain De Botton: 'How to Make an Attractive City' - We've grown good at making many things in the modern world - but strangely the art of making attractive cities has been lost. Here are some key principles for how to make attractive cities once again

Alain de Botton: 'The Ruin of London' - London's skyline was for decades protected by regulations governing the heights of buildings in the historic core. These regulations have now been torn up, and an unprecedented tower building-boom has been unleashed.

James Howard Kunstler is an author who stirs up strong feelings. In this TED talk he is deliberatly provocative in tone and wants to elicit feelings when talking about architecture and town/city planning, something which has been leeched out of all conversation around those spheres. You may agree or you may disagree, but whatever you think this is well worth a watch to my mind.

I highly recommend Kunstler's 1994 book 'The Geography Of Nowhere: The Rise And Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape':

'The Geography Of Nowhere: The Rise And Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape', 1994
By James Howard KunstlerISBN-13: 978-0671888251 (Out of print)

I came across this book when looking for writing about cities going
through huge moments of change. The title alone had me hooked.

"Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built since
the end of World War II. This tragic landscape of highway strips,
parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged
countryside is not simply an expression of our economic predicament, but
in large part a cause. It is the everyday environment where most
Americans live and work, and it represents a gathering calamity whose
effects we have hardly begun to measure. In The Geography of Nowhere,
James Howard Kunstler traces America's evolution from a nation of Main
Streets and coherent communities to a land where every place is like
no place in particular, where the city is a dead zone and the countryside
a wasteland of cars and blacktop. Now that the great suburban build-out
is over, Kunstler argues, we are stuck with the consequences: a
national living arrangement that destroys civic life while imposing
enormous social costs and economic burdens."

(Though 'out of print' it is available to buy online from the Waterstone's Marketplace here.)

Also see -'Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century', 1998
by James Howard Kunstler
ISBN-13: 978-0684837376Abebooks link

'The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition', 2003by James Howard Kunstler ISBN-13: 978-0743227230Abebooks link